One of the more fascinating things with today’s digital media saturated society is the potential for serendipitous meanderings. Today I embarked on one of these prosaic armchair journeys. The theme of today: Krautrock.

I read a RSS-fed review of a show by the Swedish band This is Head. The reviewer Håkan Engström recurred to the genre krautrock. I listened to the song 0002 by This is Head on Spotify. A really nice tune. I associated to bands like Popol Vuh, and decided to do a search. After some browsing through the list of hits I started to listen to some of the tunes of this German band. Especially the collaborations between Popol Vuh and filmmaker Werner Herzog are fascinating. Soundtracks for films like Aguirre – The Wrath of God and Nosferatu are stunningly beautiful.

So,  back to the meanderings. A bit earlier today I got to know that Mika Vainio (former Pan Sonic)  should perform together with Ryoji Ikeda at Futureeverything in Manchester. Since I will be in the city, I´ll ty to see the show. I decided to check out a bit of Vainio’s latest works. Back to Spotify, and in the search list, a remix of a Popol Vuh song. Back to Krautrock. Nothing very surprising, but this made krautrock the theme of the day.

These kinds of  swift associative meanderings weren’t possible in a pre digital world. But new technology is often quickly domesticated. Complex systems and processes quickly slip into the technological unconscious, becomes epistemic wallpaper to use a term by Nigel Thrift.

Here’s a short Spotify Playlist, a kind of soundtrack for today´s journey.

Here’s a BBC-produced documentary on Krautrock (via Olof):

Krautrock – The Rebirth of Germany (Part I-III).